2 Answers
2

First of all, the key pair should be generated by you. Your private key is yours, it doesn't belong to anyone else. You should generate the keys and give the public key to the server admin who would install it in the server.

On the other hand, the ssh command you're typing seems ok. What's the error output on your side? And on the server side?

What happens when you telnet that server on port 22?

telnet host 22

EDIT: Edited the answer after the feedback. It seems that the server doesn't have port 22 opened to your ip as the telnet timed out. Probably is closed in the firewall or something similar. Talk to the server admin and show him this debug :)

do you have anything blocking traffic on port 22 from your host? any firewalls or network devices that might restrict traffic except for certain ports?

the server administrator should be able to tell you which port, if not 22, that ssh is running on, and perhaps should have told you what you would need to do to connect, when setting this up with you. bad sysadmin.

generating your own public/private keypair would be a good idea, if you wanted to send the sysadmin your new public key, you can do something like this:

ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa

that will prompt you what to call the key, ~/.ssh/id_rsa should be fine. you'll then want to send ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to the server administrator, so he can "install" your public key.

also, if your username on the server is different from your local username, you may want to log in with:

ssh -i /path/to/privatekey user@host

where user is your username on the server, and -i /path/to/privatekey specifies your private key to use, if it is not one of the 'default' private key file names (~/.ssh/id_rsa is a default name/path, ssh will know where to look for that)